Reckoning With the Ideal Worker Body: A Qualitative Study of Workers in Chronic Pain

Implicit in the ideal worker norm is the assumption of the ideal worker body, a body that is always ready and willing to meet work demands. Yet, bodies vary in their ability to meet this ideal. Through a qualitative study of 66 workers in chronic pain, we build theory on the experience of a chronic, stigmatized deviation from the ideal worker body. Our analysis uncovered that as informants’ pain interfered with their work, they attempted to pass as ideal-worker-bodied. However, attempting to pass ultimately increased their pain and its interference with their work, thus catapulting them into a vicious cycle. For two thirds of our informants, this cycle led to their pain becoming intolerable, forcing them to reckon with pervasive ableist norms as they turned to medical professionals for help. Informants who received validating cues from medical professionals were better able to relinquish, albeit with difficulty, the ideal worker body as necessary. They came to accept an alternative to the ideal worker body: a sufficient worker body. Informants who received invalidating cues continued in the vicious cycle of striving for the ideal worker body. Our findings contribute to scholarship on bodies at work, stigma at work, and the ideal worker norm.